Organizing and accessing online handbooks

In order to fulfill these requirements, we opted for a WordNet−like conceptual hierarchy of the subjects, for navigation through and access to scientific handbooks. It has been shown that, when committed with a hypertext search task, users perform better in a hierarchical browsing pattern (through the hypertext), than in a sequential one (McEneaney, 1999). Therefore it is very important that architecture for an electronic handbook makes use of a hierarchical pattern.